Karisia Walking Safaris Blog

For days now we have noticed potatoes missing from our store and so we put into effect our crack surveilance system to catch the culprit.

Then we got a look at the thief’s face.

porcupine

The Potoato Thief is a Porcupine. A massive porcupine if your american or from the new world. New world porcupines and old world porcupines are different in several ways, one is size. the other differences I can’t remember off hand just now.

I haven’t managed to get much of anything too significant with the game camera since capturing the Bat-eared Fox images at the den. The game trails are harder to set up on, especially as this camera has a delay so that one needs to aim down the trail rather than across so to capture the animal a moment after it triggers the laser. In the evening this genet passed and you can see that he nearly was able to pass out of frame. In the morning Mr. Hare made a cameo. I was sort of more hoping for a Leopard or an aardwolf. Will keep trying.
(also look how dry it is here now – Hopefully soon with the rains i will be posting pictures of green everywhere)

Hello all, this is Kerry.
Last night our large dog came under attack from a very small but aggressive animal, the Zorilla.
When bothered by another animal the Zorilla will growl and bark and fluff up its tail. If this does not drive the attacker away, the growling rises to a high pitched scream. The Zorilla will turn around and present its attacker with a squirt from its well-developed anal glands. It stinks! Ngurruk, the dog got a full face of this foul odor and beat a hasty retreat. He was defeated and very smelly.

It has been a while since our last post and many apologies all around. We have been in the states visiting my mum and buying some new toys. The following images were taken with one of those toys, a Moultrie game viewing camera. This was our first try and look at the results (it helps to have a bat-eared fox den several hundred meters from your tent)!

First come the curious pups:

bat eared foxbat eared foxbateared fox cameratrapbat eared fox kid

Here you can see the adult with the big ears, listening and facing toward the direction of our tent:

This sad (its actually not that sad – this was an old lion) but interesting story comes from Laurence Frank from the Laikipia Predator Project. The LPP is an excellent effort fighting hard on behalf of predators and looking deeper into the conflicts that humans and predators find themselves in, in our area. Please have a look at their website http://www.lionconservation.org to learn more.
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Below is Laurence’s notes:

All –

This morning LM72 was found dead on Ol Pejeta, apparently killed by
other lions. Many thanks to Giles Prettejohn for informing us as
soon as he was found.

We collared male LM72 as a three-and-a-half year old on Segera in
January 2002. He stayed on the south half of Segera and Kihoto until
November, and then moved to Ol Jogi for a year. By March 2004 he was
back on Segera, where he resumed his old home range until August,
when he moved to Ngorare. Alayne gave him a new collar on Ngorare in
October, 2004. We think he became a pride male there, as he stayed
until April, 2006. Three days after we last found him on Ngorare, he
showed up on Mutara, presumably displaced by other males. Since then
he has moved between Mutara and Ol Pejeta; although we have not been
able to do much flying in the last two years, we had several reports
of him on OP. I attach a map showing the 78 locations we got over
the years. He covered a minimum area of 840 sq. km. in the time we
have known him.

He appears to have been badly beaten up by other males a few days
ago. He had deep infected and necrotic bite wounds on both hindlegs
and his neck, and presumably died of infections early
yesterday. Interestingly, we had a similar case of a young male
dying of infected bites and abscesses on Mpala last October.

LM72 was ten or eleven years old. To have lived that long, he was
clearly wise enough to leave cattle alone; let us hope that he left
us many offspring who learned his discretion and good manners.

Here is a list of the birds of Tumaren. It can be used as a Bird List to Laikipia excluding only some of the more montane species that we don’t get east of the Ewaso Nyiro river and that might be found on the higher country on the Laikipia Plateau. I have never uploaded a pdf file in one of my blog post so i’m unsure if it will work. hope so.

We at Tumaren would like to take this opportunity to present Theresa S with an emerald,, An emerald with legs that is.. We are very grateful for your donation Theresa and your help will go a long way toward conservation on the adjacent community land to Tumaren – We specifically want to do some snare patrolling. many thanks, jamie and kerry.
PS look at his underside!

I eat meat and probably too much of it. I found this article in the New York Times rather alarming. I have always known about these issues but the implications for just slowing down our meat consumption (rather than quitting outright) are incredible with regard to greenhouse gas.